By Sheldon

The working lives of Americans–at least the ones who are still working–has been upended with more and more of us working from home. For our family, this is old stuff. Tor the last ten years at least, and quite often prior to that I’ve worked from home, as has my spouse. But recently I’ve noticed some interesting insights emerging from people who are new to all this.

Keeping work and home life separate has been a cardinal rule of the workplace for as long as I can remember, and surely much longer. Now, of course, that’s changed. I have the good fortune to have a room set aside as my office both for my job and personal projects. But I know plenty of others working from the dining room table, and that, frankly, is a pain. But particularly for those in the “knowledge economy” this transition has thrown some aspects of their work into sharp relief.

“Real World” Work

In an article by Cal Newport over at Study Hacks Blog, he contrasts much of today’s work with the satisfaction realized when people actually made stuff and did things that manifested in the real world. He tells a story of how he and his grandfather worked together to build a gasoline engine from a crude casting, some blocks of metal, and a sheet of blueprints. They crafted the parts with machine tools, practically building the engine from scratch. Then he makes this observation:

For most “non-essential” workers, the past two months have delivered a professional experience that’s exactly the opposite of Fred Hauser running a metal lathe in his California garage. Instead of manifesting ourselves concretely in the world, we endlessly pass digital messages back and forth, taking breaks only to talk to each other about these messages over cramped video conference screens.

Before the pandemic, the ritual of traveling to a physical office helped obfuscate the disembodied nature of most knowledge work. But when this element was stripped away, the intrinsic abstraction of our efforts became impossible to miss. Fred Hauser ended his spring with a working four-stroke engine. We’ll end ours with an email inbox fuller than when we began.

“Is This Job Necessary?”

When I read this, I was forcibly reminded of another essay from a few years ago by anthropologist David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant.” This essay, originally published in August of 2013, later evolved into a book, but the essay gives the sense of his point, which is this:

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty… But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

In his book, Graeber points to some shocking survey data in which a significant fraction of people surveyed–roughly a third–quite frankly admitted that their job was utterly useless and made no meaningful contributions. Clearly, something is amiss.

Solutions?

There seem to be two approaches to dealing with this problem, not necessarily exclusive of each other. One, mentioned by Newport, is a growing interest in creating businesses that actually get people working in a craft-type context that gives the kind of inner satisfaction that workers miss. I think this is a good idea. When Henry Ford started recruiting workers to build automobiles on his assembly lines, most of those who applied were skilled machinists and craftsmen. The found the work dull and pointless. Attrition ran about 90% until Ford boosted the wages to very high levels. Incidentally, this is when people started calling those working wages “compensation.” You were being compensated not for your work, but for putting up with such a soul-killing job.

Another solution, one proposed by Graeber near the end of his book, is the Universal Basic Income, which has provoked protest from certain ideological sectors. The fear has been that giving people money to spend as they wish would lead to all manner of turpitude and general sloth, but in practice, that does not seem to be the case.

See, Debunked: The Myth That We’re All Potential Parasites

Either way, COVID-19 is forcing a much-needed reevaluation of how and why we work. Working simply to keep busy is far too prevalent in our society. What’s worse is that there is clearly a strain of antipathy towards people who have truly meaningful jobs and contribute something. I’m thinking, for example, of the scorn leveled at nurses when they aren’t saving your life, or school teachers when they aren’t taking a bullet for their kids.

I sincerely hope that our response to this current crisis can move us toward a better, more meaningful way to spend our working hours.